


Marrying The Hangman

by liketogetlost



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-01
Updated: 2013-01-01
Packaged: 2017-11-23 05:33:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/618650
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/liketogetlost/pseuds/liketogetlost
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wonders how she learned such a good left hook, now, rubbing his chin and leering. "Just commenting on the decor." Apparently she's sensitive on the subject of walls painted white.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Marrying The Hangman

**Author's Note:**

> Post series two, pre series four. The Master winds up in the parallel world, locked up in Torchwood under the watch of one Miss Tyler.

They find him in the park, nude and delirious and wearing a silver ring. The police throw a rank, scratchy blanket at him and tell him to shut the bloody hell up about dark voids and doctors until Torchwood comes to collect him two days later. 

He laughs through the blood tests, through the scans, and while the monitors count his heart beats, all four of them, he giggles straight into the techs faces that are masked with 3D glasses. 

He claps his hands with glee when they tell him a Miss Tyler demands to see him.

\--

Rose Tyler is like a second set of drums in his head. Always there, constant, like the beat of his hearts or the need to make things burn. Alone in his cell at Torchwood, he ponders her. Wonders over her.

Wonders how she learned such a good left hook, now, rubbing his chin and leering. "Just commenting on the decor." Apparently she's sensitive on the subject of walls painted white.

It continues, this back and forth, each time she questions him. He sits, middle of the empty, void-white colored interrogation room, with his legs crossed at the ankles and his head on the back of the chair while she stands in front of him and asks the same daft rubbish over, and over...

"How did you get here?" And over. Mouth stern, that pretty mouth, hands clasped behind her back ready to go for her gun at the slightest twitch of his finger. Dressed in a fitted black suit, hair straight to her shoulders. It's like something out of his fantasies, really, and it's not rare that he finds himself hard in his trousers just watching her. Also, the days he leaves the interrogation room with a black eye or a bloody lip, even better to come to later that night.

Oh, but this is the infamous Rose Tyler, heroine of the Doctors fantasies. He's seen her in the Doctors memories, read through those like trashy romance novels while he had the twat under his lock and key. Must be said, either the Doctor had taken liberties with her or she's changed, a lot. 

How sweet this could turn out, in the end game.

Every evening, as the piss-ants pull him away in shackles, he turns and watches, smirk plastered on and waiting for that blink of her eyes that means she's tired, waning. Ready to crack at any moment. But her lashes never meet, and he admires her, slowly, from foot to scalp.

She's not stupid, she won't break down if he tells her the Doctor's pulled another ten or so whores since she's been gone, kissed them all and shagged a few. She wouldn't believe him, but.

"He's breakable. More so than ever." It's another stand-off, a staring contest that neither of them ever wins. But he watches, admires the way her throat flexes as she swallows. Affected, so he moves forward.

"He's alone, and miserable. When I died!" He laughs, loud and strong. "You should have seen him collapse! The _last remaining link_ to his _home_ , his _family_! Left with nothing, no one. No hand to hold, no one to run with. Well." His tongue clicks, he shakes his head. "I'm not sure he's even alive, anymore."

She blinks those over mascaraed lashes, probably blinking away tears, and he giggles. Giggles! They think this is torture, this. This is foreplay. He closes his eyes and _savors_ it.

But then he opens them to the sound of her boots on the tile, and the click of the lock in the door as she leaves. He raises an eyebrow, twiddles his thumbs behind his back where his hands are cuffed, and counts the seconds.

She comes back after six and shoots him in the head, painting the white wall red with his blood.

\--

"How do you do it?" 

"How do you stay the same?"

"How did you get here?"

It's still too early for him to be anywhere but curled into a ball in bed, healing from his regeneration. Pete Tyler is an ugly sonofabitch and he never stays in one place, screaming into one of his ears then the other. It's making him fucking dizzy and goddamn angry so he asks for what he wants.

"Bring back your pretty little girl, maybe I'll talk." Pete just shakes his head. She hasn't been back in since, since she raised a gun to his head and blew his brains out. When he woke up, first thing he did before scream was wank off, god did she leave him hard.

They do this for months until he sees her again.

"Your hair is longer. I don't like it."

This time she has a chair. She's getting tired, good. She crosses her legs and arms, swallows and he's just about to tell her it is better for pulling now when she speaks.

"I'll do it again, ya know." Now that's one thing that's caught him by surprise, one thing in a long line of things that never shocked him. A smile on her face.

"I'll wait til the wound heals, and then I'll blow your head off again. And I'll keep doing it, until you talk. And if that doesn't make you talk, then I'll send you to medical. They're really itching to get at 'cha, all those juicy alien bits and bobs. They'll pull you apart and see if you grow again. They have lotsa ideas, now." She picks a piece of lint off her trousers and dirties the shining floor with it. Stands and crosses the room til she's bent, eye to eye and breathing the same space of air he is. His trousers are tight and there are the drums, louder, insistent.

"That's one thing you've got, is time. And even if it takes another twenty, forty, fifty years, well. There will be people here long after I'm gone. And they won't stop." She leans in and whispers in his ear. "I won't stop."

Her cheek brushes his as she pulls back, and he exhales slow and long, inhales deep and tries to calm the steadying drums in his head. He narrows his eyes up at her and lets his mouth curve, slowly, into a smile.

"Oh, I like you."

She blinks and smiles back, crosses her arms again and nods. 

\--

She comes in one morning with her hair tied up, signature hoop earrings hitting her neck as she moves.

“You have a lovely neck, Miss Tyler.” He says, leaning forward and resting his elbows on his knees. She'd ordered the minions to allow him to move freely as long as his hands stayed cuffed, kind thing she was. 

She ignores him and fills out paperwork on her lap. She's just trying to piss him off, coming in like this for no reason.

“Bet it would snap real nice in my grip.” It would, too, bones breaking beneath his hands, cartilage crunching under his fingers. The thought makes him shiver, makes his blood boil. He studies her, learns her lines and curves and follows the dips of her collarbones and the hollow of her throat. Imagines his thumbs pressing just _there_ , cutting off oxygen and oh. But then, just the thought of touching her neck, softly, with just fingertips or his nose or his lips, that kind of was enough right there. Delicious little bitch she was.

She keeps writing, flipping pages over and lets her ponytail rest over one shoulder. 

He goddamn fucking hates the days she doesn't talk to him.

\--

 

“Let's be honest, now.” He says, from his space on the floor behind her. Exactly eight feet behind her, in fact. His fingers laced together, cuffs clinking as his thumbs do their twiddling, he sits with his arms resting on his knees and his legs open in a silent but obvious invitation. 

“I could tell you everything, how I got here, how I regenerate, all the tasty details of my villainous plans.” He's talking to the back of her head, because she's stupid. Because she thinks she's making him uneasy, by ignoring him, by pretending he's too insignificant to look at. But really, she's just an amateur. 

“And I could be lying. Or I could be telling the truth, and have anticipated all this, and be using you, Torchwood, for something.” Eight feet, two inches, one neck on Miss Rose Tyler. “So then isn't all this for naught?” 

He waits one breath and leaps twice, wraps his cuffed arms around her neck and pulls forward, chain taunt at her throat and tightening. His grin is manic and oh, life is good. Until his breathing begins to calm and he hears the cock of a gun, recognizes the cold steel of the barrel she has pressed to his temple.

“Go on, then.” Her own breathing is heavy and dammit if it doesn't make him think of her, soft but tough and yielding beneath him. “You won't even make me breathless before I get two bullets in your brain.”

He rolls his eyes and thinks about telling her to see someone about this obsession she has with blowing his head off.

\--

“You don't have the faintest idea who I am, little girl.” He walks around her chair, cuffs singing, feet scuffing the clean white shine of the floor. 

She cocks and uncocks her gun and looks up at him through black lashes that he dreams of pulling out, one by one as she cries for mercy. “Fuck off and sit down, already.”

A chuckle vibrates in his chest and he sighs. It's getting boring, really. The months of playing and he knows what they want, it's what he wants, too. So, check mate. 

Through he's always cheating, got an extra Queen waiting in the wings.

He's behind her, mouth at her ear and she thinks he can't tell she's scared but he can. Time Lord.

“You want to know, Rose? You want to know _everything_?” Whispers, hushes at her and she turns, gun cocked and ready and aimed at his stomach.

Her mouth is steady but her wrist shakes, her toes are curled inside her shoes and he chuckles to himself.

“I have techs that could cut open your head and find out _everything_.” She says, mocking his tone and trying to hide the the uncertainty in her eyes.

“Then why don't you let them?! I'll tell you why, because you _need me_! Alive, preferably. You need me because you want me to tell you how to get back to the Doctor, right? Oh, Rose Tyler. Forever trying to beat down that wall and get back to her one true love, that arrogant prick. Even if it means using his sworn enemy, oh well that's just semantics, isn't it Dame Rose?” Her foot sinks into the softness of his stomach with force and he coughs, sputters and laughs down at the floor.

“You gonna tell me, then tell me!” She screams, waving the gun and pushing him against the nearest wall.

They stand straight, eye to eye, and he brightens at the mad spark he sees in her baby doll browns. His tongue wipes across his dry lips and he smirks, shakes his head and takes a step forward. “No. I'm gonna show you.”

Two fingers each to her temples and the gun hits the floor with a clatter.

\--

Oh, and it's simply _blissful_ , inside her head. All soft and pretty and bright, neon colors like he thought it would be. It turns him on, of course it does, but that's not what this is about. As much as he would love to open all her doors and push himself deep into each and every one of her precious Earth girl memories. It's about showing her. Everything. Well, mostly everything. He's not a complete whore.

He opens door after door for her. Slamming them open and telling her all his dirty secrets. The death, the destruction, the ever steady drumbeat of his insanity. He's not a modest bloke by any standard, and he wants her to know exactly who she's dealing with, take her down a peg or two or three. Each door makes her gasp, and weaken just that much more in his arms. There's him and the Doctor at the academy, laughing and joking over their books. There's him, the first him, memory tinted in black and white just because it amuses him to do so. He shows her a nice montage, sans dramatic music, of his reputation through the galaxy. Fiery explosions, screaming faces, her Doctor crying over his dying body, it all pours through her head like wine into a glass and she begins to shake with the overwhelming pain of it all. 

The drums pound louder and she screams like a howling ghost.

Pete and some trolls bust in before she's quit, and they grab her just as he pulls his hands away and lets her slump to the floor.

“What the hell did you do to her? What the hell did you do?” Pete Tyler screams at him as he holds his daughter beneath her head.

They watch as her eyelids flutter open, slowly coming back into her own mind and trying to process the buffet of information she was just fed. “It's alright, I'm. I'm alright.” But her voice is hoarse and her skin is pale. Her eyes find him, look up at him and finally, recognize him.

She licks her lips and finds her breath, somewhere in her lungs that tighten and expand like lightning inside her chest.

“Master.” She whispers, like a fact instead of a title.

He shivers like he's dancing and rubs his hands together, catlike grin on his face. “Oh, yes. Say it again, love. Once more, for me.”

\--

It takes her three days.

He waits in his cell, hours collecting like dust on his cell floor. Senses her thoughts even through the thick steel doors. Can feel her weighing the pros and cons, the yeses and nos, the lonely days and the way it felt to see him again, even if it was only inside her own head. All that human rubbish. 

Anyhow, he knows she's coming. What choice does she have.

She doesn't even order him to the interrogation room, just waltzes in finally without a guard or anything. He smiles to himself before rolling over in his bed to find her staring down at him, trying to look brave. 

“Why, if I had known you were planning on visiting, I would have cleaned up a little.” Swings his legs around off the bed and sits up, watching her watching him. Oh, she's wearing a skirt today. That's new. Black, of course, ending about an inch above the knee and legs dark with stockings. And she's close enough to touch. So he does, slides the back of one finger up and down the curve of her calve and fuck if his trousers don't tighten in a blink.

His head tilts up until he meets her eye, skin free of make up, circles dark and telling beneath the lids. A smile tugs at his lips and his hand reaches higher up her skirt as he feels her leg shake at his touch. “Can I at least offer you a nice hard fuck?” 

It's not completely surprising when she elbows him in the face, throwing him to the floor and knocking him breathless with pain. Blood washes down his throat and he swallows it down like milk.

His laughter bubbles up from his chest and spills out red on the floor. He wipes his mouth and turns to look back up at her. “Then just a blow job, maybe?”

This time she has a knife. Presses it to his throat, she kneels down beside him and most definitely by accident pushes her knee right into his groin. Her whisper feels like a warm breeze on his face and he wouldn't want her any other way right now.

“Let's get something straight. No one, not anyone, gives a shit about you. Not really. They might be curious about you, want to test you and see what exactly you're made of, but really, they have more to worry about than a slimy little pervert like you. You're useless. You're a fucking pain in the arse and well, you're beginning to smell, frankly.” She blows a strand of silky blond out of face and he moans when it brushes across his nose. Her knee presses harder.

“ _I'm_ the only one keeping you here. Your life is in my hands. If I asked, they'd cut you into four separate pieces and keep them locked in four different freezers and then well, I don't know. I doubt you'd be doing any regenerating.” He can feel the blade shake in her hand.

“That's real sweet, love. I appreciate you trying to scare me, but really that just sounds like some hardcore bondage I'd be quite interested in trying. Now tell daddy why you're really here.”

The brown orbs of her eyes are big and dark as the void he came from. The blade does cut him, but by accident, and neither of them seem to notice as blood trickles down his neck to hide beneath his shirt collar. 

“I know you can get me back.”

He nods, pulling the knife in deeper.

“How?”

A grin spreads across his face. “Nuh uh, first you trade me your juice for my soda, Rosie.”

Sweat beads on her forehead and her lovely, lovely chest swells faster and faster. It's beautiful.

“What do you want?”

His eyes narrow and the grin fades just as quickly as it came. “You know I won't try anything while I'm still here. Because you and I feel the same way about this world. It's nothing, absolutely nothing. Worthless, pointless to try and destroy or rule over, bleak and boring to live in. This world lacks the one thing we both have in common, the one thing we both want the most.” Poking at that heart of hers, chest open and the organ beating bare.

“The Doctor.” Rose closes her eyes for a moment, gasps like the words hurt. “You want to come back with me.”

“Right on the nose, love. Figure it's a fair game, you go off and find your love muffin and then you can come after me. 'Cause I'm no match for the Doctor and Rose!” He cackles, and coughs. “But still, it's always fun to _try_.”

“And you need me.”

“I don't fancy spending eternity times infinity in this box, no. Need your pretty little hands to build the ways and means.”

"And why should I keep my word? Why don't I just use you to get back and then leave you here?"

His chuckle vibrates in his chest and no doubt carries to her body. He can feel her, at the edges of his mind, a residual connection still strong enough to tug. So he does, _tug_ , and smiles when he sees her wince in pain. "Hit me with your best shot."

Rose stands, gripping the knife frosted with his blood, and stares down at him. The snake curled around the apple. 

"Fine."

Tongue still tasting of iron, he licks his lips and moans. "There's a girl. Now, help me up, will you?"

When she leans down and slits his throat with one broad swipe of the knife, and leaves him to die _again_ , his head hits the floor with a thud, and he smiles. Before it all goes black, his last thought is how far gone she is already, and what one little _tug_ will do to get her even closer to him.

\--

He awakes to the sound of her voice. Shaking in her throat, the first song that he hears.

"Tell me what to do."

She speaks along with the rhythm in his head, and his dry lips curve into a smile.

"Have you ever heard of a dimensional cannon?"


End file.
